By Al Case

The mugger charges out of the alley and throws a whole, darned garbage can at you! Do you ask him to wait because you’re only on your tenth Karate lesson and haven’t reached the beating up the mugger section? Or do you ask him to hold off because, here it comes, you forgot to renew your contract after the fourth year at the local dojo?

There is a point to all this silliness, why do the martial arts take so long to learn? You can teach a guy to fly a jet, get in a dogfight and get shot down, spend time in a concentration camp, get released and run for political office, and become a senator, and retire, in the time it takes to learn some systems of the martial arts. I heard of one system that it takes seventeen years to get to Black Belt in!

Of course, there is the answer that you’re learning more than just self defense. You’re learning a life style, you’re investing in your old age, you’re solving the martial mysteries of the ages. But that garbage can is still flying at your head and you’ve already taken ten whole lessons so what are you gonna do?

There is a saying, garbage in, garbage out. And, to draw a parallel, if something is hard to put into your head, then it is going to be hard to get out. So maybe it’s time to look for an art that is as fast to learn as boxing, or running, or some other easily understood sport.

Yes, I know Karate is an art, not a sport, but it can still be learned fast. It just has to be taught by principle, and not by one significant technique after another. Techniques that are, to be truthful, random data and don’t really relate to one another.

That does pose a problem, that even if you learn a thousand techniques, you might not be able to make sense out of the whole thing until you reach technique one thousand and one. And the time it takes, well, a hundred years is to long to become competent. And then float off to the heavenly choir.

The solution, as I started to say earlier, is that the martial arts must be taught by concept. Instead of having a fellow memorize hundreds of techniques and katas, have him learn the concept which is directly beneath all those katas and techniques. Have him learn the concept, and, suddenly, you’re going to find that he can figure out those thousand techniques without any need for endless memorization.

Give him an acorn and throw in the watering pot, that’s what I believe, and then watch the oak shoot upwards. Most martial artists, and I don’t mean to be mean in this observation, are lost in the limbs of the trees. The real way to teach, however, is to show the guy the principles, then have use those principles, and, faster than a rabbit on steroids, you’ve got yourself a fast and competent martial artist.